I am really proud of this one, readers! It is a heavily play tested unique system. The book is full of detailed maps, and beautiful pulp Art from the 1870s to the 1950s.
Download includes a form fillable character sheet, as well as a static one, and dungeon Alchemist files as well as Virtual Table-Top exports for three locations. The book has two adventure scenarios. One a full size dungeon call, the other a simple shootout.
They also has the file for a poster-sized map of the campaign setting.
This is part 2 of a fictionalized version of my solo game of Mongoose Traveller (2022), which I wanted to share with you all.
One of the things I make a point of doing any time I am reviewing a TTRPG is to play a couple of sessions of it in solo mode so that I can get a feel for how it plays at the table. If I am going to share a game with you, I want to make sure I am doing my best to have good information. It is not enough to describe the mechanics of a game; I want to have a sense of game play.
This unfortunately slows down my reviewing process - a lot. Recently, one of my kids has developed some pretty extreme issues related to the way his autism expresses itself. I have had to drop everything - including work - to take care of the little guy. Finding the time to sit down and take a trip into a dungeon or into outer space has been hard as of late. And when I do, it has been more for the joy of playing than for the purposes of the blog.
But I wanted to relate a cool story from a recent solo game. I decided to sit down and play a round of the 2022 Mongoose edition of Traveller so I could have a better basis of comparison to Cepheus Deluxe and Stars Without Number, which I want to finally review properly in the near future.
This is the first adventure of my home Traveller campaign; and I will present it in four parts to make it more digestible than last year's Death in Space story.
Cehpheus Deluxe, Enhanced Edition is a retroclone that mixes elements of Classic Traveller with Megatraveller and a few more modern upgrades to make it play a little more smoothly.
About two years ago I ran a campaign using White Star: Galaxy Edition as a base set on a starship called the C.H.V. Natani, and posted play reports here (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). It was meant as a short game to give us a little break while some of our players dealt with life issues that made dedicating time to our heavier more involved Silver Gull campaign was difficult. While I was playing White Star with my friends, however, I kept running up against the limitations of the system.
My players didn't find starship battles in White Star as exciting as they wished they were. A couple of players wanted to dabble in mercantile endeavours, which White Star wasn't built for (heck, one of my players was a gmae dev' on Elite: Dangerous and was hoping for a game experience like it) And while they enjoyed some of the silliness of space-faring rockstardom and jedi powers to an extent, they ultimately preferred the adventures where the characters' odd superpowers didn't come into focus. In other words, they really would have been happier playing Traveller.
And so I looked for a Traveller-based game that I could grab in hardcopy at a reasonable price, because I am fed up with .PDFs. Ideally I wanted something I could get both physically and digitally, and so I settled on Cepheus Deluxe and I am glad that I have.
I am co-writing some adventures with my son for his schoolmates in Basic Fantasy RPG. We decided to design a style of magic based on names and nicknames to play a role in the early adventures. This led to us designing five spells created by the feared Appellomancer, Ngo-Gua whose tomb the PCs will be raiding in search of a book of the True Names of evil spirits (the Numaomicon).
I thought I might share the spells here to offer up some humour.
The PCs might be able to find Ngo-Gua's spellbook and thus acquire and these for their own nefarious purposes.
Shortly after I made Drakken in 2022 I was approached by an organization in California that was dedicated to promote literacy in prisons. Apparently, Dungeons & Dragons was their most requested reading material from inmates at the time. D&D being expensive as it was at the time was simply not possible, but the potential benefits of TTRPGs for inmates was too good to pass up. They were hoping that I would be willing to let them, for a modest fee, distribute Drakken, remixed a bit to meet their requirements.
I told them they could have it for free.
Personally I am quite proud of the creation, and thought it could be a lot of fun. But, sadly, its reception was, at best, lukewarm. Serves me right for jumping into a project before getting the buy in, I suppose.
So I asked my kids what they wanted in a role-playing game, and the best answer I got was "I want to do awesome stuff!"
"What kind of awesome stuff?" I asked.
"You know! Awesome!" was sadly as far as the answers got.
So, I sat down and thought about what my kids seem to think is "awesome."
